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Rounding Up

Rounding Up

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Welcome to Rounding Up, the professional learning podcast brought to you by The Math Learning Center. Two things have always been true in education: Ongoing professional learning is essential, and teachers are extremely busy people. Rounding Up is a podcast designed to provide meaningful, bite-sized professional learning for busy educators and instructional leaders. I'm Mike Wallus, vice president for educator support at The Math Learning Center and host of the show. In each episode, we'll explore topics important to teachers, instructional leaders, and anyone interested in elementary mathematics education. Topics such as posing purposeful questions, effectively recording student thinking, cultivating students' math identity, and designing asset-based instruction from multilingual learners. Don't miss out! Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts. Each episode will also be published on the Bridges Educator Site. We hope you'll give Rounding Up a try, and that the ideas we discuss have a positive impact on your teaching and your students' learning.2022 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org Ciencia Matemáticas
Episodios
  • Season 4 | Episode 5 - Ramsey Merritt, Improving Students' Turn & Talk Experience

    Season 4 | Episode 5 - Ramsey Merritt, Improving Students' Turn & Talk Experience
    Nov 6 2025
    Ramsey Merritt, Improving Students' Turn & Talk Experience ROUNDING UP: SEASON 4 | EPISODE 5 Most educators know what a turn and talk is—but are your students excited to do them? In this episode, we put turn and talks under a microscope. We'll talk with Ramsey Merritt from the Harvard Graduate School of Education about ways to revamp and better scaffold turn and talks to ensure your students are having productive mathematical discussions. BIOGRAPHY Ramsey Merritt is a lecturer in education at Brandeis University and the director of leadership development for Reading (MA) Public Schools. He has taught and coached at every level of the U.S. school system in both public and independent schools from New York to California. Ramsey also runs an instructional leadership consulting firm, Instructional Success Partners, LLC. Prior to his career in education, he worked in a variety of roles at the New York Times. He is currently completing his doctorate in education leadership at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Ramsey's book, Diving Deeper with Upper Elementary Math, will be released in spring 2026. TRANSCRIPT Mike Wallus: Welcome to the podcast, Ramsey. So great to have you on. Ramsey Merritt: It is my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Mike: So turn and talk's been around for a while now, and I guess I'd call it ubiquitous at this point. When I visit classrooms, I see turn and talks happen often with quite mixed results. And I wanted to start with this question: At the broadest level, what's the promise of a turn and talk? When strategically done well, what's it good for? Ramsey: I think at the broadest level, we want students talking about their thinking and we also want them listening to other students' thinking and ideally being open to reflect, ask questions, and maybe even change their minds on their own thinking or add a new strategy to their thinking. That's at the broadest level. I think if we were to zoom in a little bit, I think turn and talks are great for idea generation. When you are entering a new concept or a new lesson or a new unit, I think they're great for comparing strategies. They're obviously great for building listening skills with the caveat that you put structures in place for them, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. And building critical-thinking and questioning skills as well. I think I've also seen turn and talks broadly categorized into engagement, and it's interesting when I read that because to me I think about engagement as the teacher's responsibility and what the teacher needs to do no matter what the pedagogical tool is. So no matter whether it's a turn and talk or something else, engagement is what the teacher needs to craft and create a moment. And I think a lot of what we'll probably talk about today is about crafting moments for the turn and talk. In other words, how to engage students in a turn and talk, but not that a turn and talk is automatically engagement. Mike: I love that, and I think the language that you've used around crafting is really important. And it gets to the heart of what I was excited about in this conversation because a turn and talk is a tool, but there is an art and a craft to designing its implementation that really can make or break the tool itself. Ramsey: Yeah. If we look back a little bit as to where turn and talk came from, I sort of tried to dig into the papers on this. And what I found was that it seems as if turn and talks may have been a sort of spinoff of the think-pair-share, which has been around a little bit longer. And what's interesting in looking into this is, I think that turn and talks were originally positioned as a sort of cousin of think-pair-share that can be more spontaneous and more in the moment. And I think what has happened is we've lost the "think" part. So we've run with it, and we've said, "This is great," but we forgot that students still need time to think before they turn and talk. And so what I see a lot is, it gets to be somewhat too spontaneous, and certain students are not prepared to just jump into conversations. And we have to take a step back and sort of think about that. Mike: That really leads into my next question quite well because I have to confess that when I've attended presentations, there are points in time when I've been asked to turn and talk when I can tell you I had not a lot of interest nor a lot of clarity about what I should do. And then there were other points where I couldn't wait to start that conversation. And I think this is the craft and it's also the place where we should probably think about, "What are the pitfalls that can derail or have a turn and talk kind of lose the value that's possible?" How would you talk about that? Ramsey: Yeah, it is funny that we as adults have that reaction when people say, "Turn and talk." The three big ones that I see the most, and I should sort of say here, I've probably been in 75 to 100 buildings and triple or quadruple ...
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    28 m
  • Season 4 | Episode 4 - Pam Harris, Exploring the Power & Purpose of Number Strings

    Season 4 | Episode 4 - Pam Harris, Exploring the Power & Purpose of Number Strings
    Oct 23 2025
    Pam Harris, Exploring the Power & Purpose of Number Strings ROUNDING UP: SEASON 4 | EPISODE 4 I've struggled when I have a new strategy I want my students to consider and despite my best efforts, it just doesn't surface organically. While I didn't want to just tell my students what to do, I wasn't sure how to move forward. Then I discovered number strings. Today, we're talking with Pam Harris about the ways number strings enable teachers to introduce new strategies while maintaining opportunities for students to discover important relationships. BIOGRAPHY Pam Harris, founder and CEO of Math is Figure-out-able™, is a mom, a former high school math teacher, a university lecturer, an author, and a mathematics teacher educator. Pam believes real math is thinking mathematically, not just mimicking what a teacher does. Pam helps leaders and teachers to make the shift that supports students to learn real math. RESOURCES Young Mathematicians at Work by Catherine Fosnot and Maarten Dolk Procedural fluency in mathematics: Reasoning and decision-making, not rote application of procedures position by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Bridges number string example from Grade 5, Unit 3, Module 1, Session 1 (BES login required) Developing Mathematical Reasoning: Avoiding the Trap of Algorithms by Pamela Weber Harris and Cameron Harris Math is Figure-out-able!™ Problem Strings TRANSCRIPT Mike Wallus: Welcome to the podcast, Pam. I'm really excited to talk with you today. Pam Harris: Thanks, Mike. I'm super glad to be on. Thanks for having me. Mike: Absolutely. So before we jump in, I want to offer a quick note to listeners. The routine we're going to talk about today goes by several different names in the field. Some folks, including Pam, refer to this routine as "problem strings," and other folks, including some folks at The Math Learning Center, refer to them as "number strings." For the sake of consistency, we'll use the term "strings" during our conversation today. And Pam, with that said, I'm wondering if for listeners, without prior knowledge, could you briefly describe strings? How are they designed? How are they intended to work? Pam: Yeah, if I could tell you just a little of my history. When I was a secondary math teacher and I dove into research, I got really curious: How can we do the mental actions that I was seeing my son and other people use that weren't the remote memorizing and mimicking I'd gotten used to? I ran into the work of Cathy Fosnot and Maarten Dolk, and [their book] Young Mathematicians at Work, and they had pulled from the Netherlands strings. They called them "strings." And they were a series of problems that were in a certain order. The order mattered, the relationship between the problems mattered, and maybe the most important part that I saw was I saw students thinking about the problems and using what they learned and saw and heard from their classmates in one problem, starting to let that impact their work on the next problem. And then they would see that thinking made visible and the conversation between it and then it would impact how they thought about the next problem. And as I saw those students literally learn before my eyes, I was like, "This is unbelievable!" And honestly, at the very beginning, I didn't really even parse out what was different between maybe one of Fosnot's rich tasks versus her strings versus just a conversation with students. I was just so enthralled with the learning because what I was seeing were the kind of mental actions that I was intrigued with. I was seeing them not only happen live but grow live, develop, like they were getting stronger and more sophisticated because of the series of the order the problems were in, because of that sequence of problems. That was unbelievable. And I was so excited about that that I began to dive in and get more clear on: What is a string of problems? The reason I call them "problem strings" is I'm K–12. So I will have data strings and geometry strings and—pick one—trig strings, like strings with functions in algebra. But for the purposes of this podcast, there's strings of problems with numbers in them. Mike: So I have a question, but I think I just want to make an observation first. The way you described that moment where students are taking advantage of the things that they made sense of in one problem and then the next part of the string offers them the opportunity to use that and to see a set of relationships. I vividly remember the first time I watched someone facilitate a string and feeling that same way, of this routine really offers kids an opportunity to take what they've made sense of and immediately apply it. And I think that is something that I cannot say about all the routines that I've seen, but it was really so clear. I just really resonate with that experience of, what will this do for children? Pam: Yeah, and if I can offer an additional word in there, it ...
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    44 m
  • Season 4 | Episode 3 - Kim Montague—I Have, You Need: The Utility Player of Instructional Routines

    Season 4 | Episode 3 - Kim Montague—I Have, You Need: The Utility Player of Instructional Routines
    Oct 9 2025
    Kim Montague, I Have, You Need: The Utility Player of Instructional Routines ROUNDING UP: SEASON 4 | EPISODE 3 In sports, a utility player is someone who can play multiple positions competently, providing flexibility and adaptability. From my perspective, the routine I have, you need may just be the utility player of classroom routines. Today we're talking with Kim Montague about I have, you need and the ways it can be used to support everything from fact fluency to an understanding of algebraic properties. BIOGRAPHY Kim Montague is a podcast cohost and content lead at Math is Figure-out-able™. She has also been a teacher for grades 3–5, an instructional coach, a workshop presenter, and a curriculum developer. Kim loves visiting classrooms and believes that when you know your content and know your kids, real learning occurs. RESOURCES Math is Figure-out-able!™ Podcast Math is FigureOutAble!™ Guide (Download) Journey Coaching TRANSCRIPT Mike Wallus: Welcome to the podcast, Kim. I am really excited to talk with you today. So let me do a little bit of grounding. For listeners without prior knowledge, I'm wondering if you could briefly describe the I have, you need routine. How does it work, and how would you describe the roles that the teacher and the student play? Kim Montague: Thanks for having me, Mike. I'm excited to be here. I think it's an important routine. So for those people who have never heard of I have, you need, it is a super simple routine that came from a desire that I had for students to become more fluent with partners of ten, hundred, thousand. And so it simply works as a call-and-response. Often I start with a context, and I might say, "Hey, we're going to pretend that we have 10 of something, and if I have 7 of them, how many would you need so that together we have those 10?" And so it's often prosed as a missing addend. With older students, obviously, I'm going to have some higher numbers, but it's very call-and-response. It's playful. It's game-like. I'll lob out a question, wait for students to respond. I'm choosing the numbers, so it's a teacher-driven purposeful number sequence, and then students figure out the missing number. I often will introduce a private signal so that kids have enough wait time to think about their answer and then I'll signal everyone to give their response. Mike: OK, so there's a lot to unpack there. I cannot wait to do it. One of the questions I've been asking folks about routines this season is just, at the broadest level, regardless of the numbers that the educator selects, how would you describe what you think I have, you need is good for? What's the routine good for? How can an educator think about its purpose or its value? You mentioned fluency. Maybe say a little bit more about that and if there's anything else that you think it's particularly good for. Kim: So I think one of the things that is really fantastic about I have, you need is that it's really simple. It's a simple-to-introduce, simple-to-facilitate routine, and it's great for so many different grade levels and so many different areas of content. And I think that's true for lots of routines. Teachers don't have time to reintroduce something brand new every single day. So when you find a routine that you can exchange pieces of content, that's really helpful. It's short, and it can be done anywhere. And like I said, it builds fluency, which is a hot topic and something that's important. So I can build fluency with partners of ten, partners of a hundred, partners of thousand, partners of one. I can build complementary numbers for angle measure and fractions. Lots of different areas depending on the grade that you're teaching and what you're trying to focus on. Mike: So one of the things that jumped out for me is the extent to which this can reveal structure. When we're talking about fluency, in some ways that's code for the idea that a lot of our combinations we're having kids think about—the structure of ten or a hundred or a thousand or, in the case of fractions, one whole and its equivalence. Does that make sense? Kim: Yeah, absolutely. So we have a really cool place value system. And I think that we give a lot of opportunities, maybe to place label, but we don't give a lot of opportunities to experience the structure of number. And so there are some very nice structures within partners of ten that then repeat themselves, in a way, within partners of a hundred and partners of a thousand and partners of one, like I mentioned. And if kids really deeply understand the way numbers form and the way they are fitting together, we can make use of those ideas and those experiences within other things like addition, subtraction. So this routine is not simply about, "Can you name a partner number?," but it's laying foundation in a fun experience that kids then are gaining fluency that is going to be applied to other work that they're doing. Mike: I love that, and I think it's a great...
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    31 m
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